Tax Guru-Ker$tetter Letter
Sunday, February 09, 2003
Having It Both Ways
About four or five years ago, I was starting work on earning my securities licenses so that I could share in the big bucks investment advisors were making. I had to drop it when I became far too busy to handle those projects I already had. While I missed out on the fees from the booming stock market, his has worked out well. As this story shows, everyone was as happy as could be while their portfolios were rising in value. However, when things turned sour, they started looking for someone to blame and cover their losses.
While I have no doubt that there were some stock brokers using the classic account churning techniques to generate commissions, many of the investors suing their brokers are just sore losers who don't want to pay the price for their own risk taking. It's really just another example of people refusing to suffer the consequences for their actions, such as suing McDonalds for making them fat.
KMK